1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to reverse proxy servers commonly used in the Internet environment, and more specifically to a method and apparatus for reducing overhead in reverse proxy servers when processing web pages.
2. Related Art
Reverse proxy servers generally refer to devices which are located at a logical edge of an intranet (e.g., a network owned/operated entirely by a corporation or administrative entity) and enable clients (e.g., a personal computer with a browser software) on the Internet to access web servers located within the intranet. In an example situation, all requests (from a client to a server) for web pages from outside of an intranet, and the corresponding responses are channeled only through a reverse proxy server.
By using a reverse proxy server, providing direct access (typically at the internet protocol layer level) to the web servers (from clients on the Internet) may not be necessary, thereby potentially enhancing data security on the web servers. In other words, the reverse proxy server may serve as an intermediary between web servers (located in an intranet) and the clients (on the Internet) such that direct access of web servers from the clients on Internet may not be required.
While operating as an intermediary, a reverse proxy server may process web pages to perform several tasks. One such task is modification of URLs in a web page being forwarded to a client on Internet. The URL may be modified, for example, to ensure that a client can access web pages represented by the URLs (uniform resource locator) encoded in a web page presently being transmitted to a client. Challenges may be presented if a URL contains an address (e.g., domain name address or IP address) which is accessible only in the intranet but not from the Internet, because the client may not have direct (i.e., at IP/network layer level) access to a web server at the address.
Accordingly, a prior reverse proxy server may change a URL (in a web page presently being forwarded) to point to the reverse proxy server itself with the prior URL being provided potentially as a parameter. As a result, the reverse proxy server (accessible from Internet) receives any web page requests corresponding to the subject URL and the parameter may be used to serve the web page request, as is well known in the relevant arts.
However, it may be desirable to reduce the overhead on reverse proxy servers while processing web pages, for example, to enable a reverse proxy server to serve more requests quickly.